Fallen
by tsutsuji
Summary: Liam's curiosity about Kevin Regnard leads to a strange meeting. Memories should not be left lying around where people can stumble into them. Break x Liam x Kevin


**Title: Fallen** (possibly part 1 of ... whatever)

Author: Tsutsuji

Fandom: Pandora Hearts

Pairing: Break/Liam implied. Eventual Break/Liam/Kevin intended, hahaha

Rating: PG at most

Warning: none so far, except not beta'd as usual. In fact I feel like this is still kind of a first draft, so it might change quite a bit if I ever decide to continue this.

Word count: around 2300.

Summary: Memories should not be left lying around where people can stumble into them.

AN: You see, this was only supposed to be a couple of paragraphs of explanatory flashback in the midst of a threesome, and look what it turned into...

* * *

It happened because Liam's innate curiosity had been captured by Duke Barma's revelation about Break's past, turning his initial horror to fascination, and also because his concern for Break's health had inspired him to follow up certain reports of Chain activity on his own, without informing Break about them.

As far as Liam knew, those two things were only connected by his love for Xerxes Break. He had no reason to expect that one would have any effect on the other.

The reports of several seemingly random appearances of Chains in the city had been almost entirely ignored, because the Chains had not actually attacked anyone; they had simply appeared and then faded away shortly afterward. Official opinion was that they were only the imagined products of a worried population, illusions fostered by vague fears. But Liam noticed a pattern about the seemingly random appearances that most others in Pandora would have missed, and the center of that pattern happened to be a particular location Break had told Liam to leave out of his report explaining the shocking appearance of Oz Vessalius and B-Rabbit in the middle of Pandora some time earlier. The mysteriously disappearing Chains had all been seen in an area around the dingy back alley where Break had managed to get himself and Alice kidnapped by Cheshire.

Liam thought of telling Oz or Sharon or maybe even Gilbert about it, but it would have been silly to do so if there was nothing to it after all. On the other hand, if there was something, Break was certain to get wind of it sooner or later, and the last thing Liam wanted was for him to go rushing in and risk his already fragile health in a battle with some chain that had been drawn to the place.

Break, of course, would have chided him severely for worrying too much. But Barma's revelation had made them even closer than they were before, and so he worried even more than he had before, which was quite nerve-wracking enough. So Liam shuffled the reports to the bottom of the stack on his desk and kept his concerns to himself, and at the first opportunity, he went to visit the area on his own.

He felt even more doubtful that there was any reason for concern as he trudged through the alleys that led away from the central square; there was nothing there but dingy brick walls and dirty cobblestones, entirely ordinary. He hardly paused when something crunched under his boot, but he glanced down when a gleam from a mirrored shard of glass caught his attention.

It wasn't his own eye that was reflected back up to him from the narrow sliver of glass beside his foot. A familiar red eye, wide with horror, stared back at him. As he watched, it went blank and started to fall closed, as if the life had been snuffed out of it.

"Xerxes!" he shouted. Without thinking, he dropped to the ground on hands and knees, and found himself falling into the spiraling darkness of a memory.

He knew that it couldn't possibly be real; he could not possibly have just fallen into a shard of glass on the ground! But then a man appeared tumbling down beside him, wrapped in black chains; his eyes were closed, and his dark cloak and long white hair drifted out behind him as he fell. Horrified beyond reason, remembering what awaited that person in the depths of the Abyss - because real or not, it was perfectly clear where they were falling to - Liam grabbed onto his arm and struggled to pull him back. The leaden weight of the chains and the man's limp body pulled him downward, like a log caught in a whirlpool; he hardly seemed to slow their fall at all.

He remembered the story vividly, but hearing about it was nothing compared to the madness that he found himself in the midst of a moment later. Chattering dolls darted through the air in a crazy dance, and the shelves of the circular room were all full of their rolling eyes and clattering mouths. In the center of the room, a cat-like creature with bandaged eyes crouched beside a beautiful, mad-eyed girl in white.

Kevin had awoken and sat up next to him on the floor where they'd landed, staring at the scene with horrified wonder.

"What is this?" he muttered. "Have I finally gone mad after all?"

Liam couldn't find his voice to answer, and he wasn't sure he knew the answer anyway.

With the madness swirling around them, it took him a moment to realize that the scene didn't match the story he'd heard; something had gone even stranger than it should have been. The madly grinning dolls flew around them, leering at them with their jointed bodies clacking, but Cheshire and the white Alice hadn't even noticed their arrival. They were far more interested in another person in the room, a ragged, bloodstained boy with blond hair and mismatched eyes. Another figure lay in a small, dark heap beyond him, not moving. The blond boy rolled around on the checkerboard floor in front of Alice, adding his hysterical laughter to the cacophony all around them.

"You look different," he said, grinning up at Alice from the floor, "but you're just as simple-minded as ever, aren't you? Don't you know? Jack won't be coming to tea with you ever again. I'm sure he's already dead!"

Alice screamed at him, her lovely young face distorted with rage. Her screech rattled the walls above them, and they cracked like glass. The floor lurched, sending Kevin tumbling back against Liam. For a moment they stared at each other, horrified and bewildered, while the world around them shattered.

Cheshire screamed Alice's name and ran to her, and she glanced back, just then, and saw them. She smiled, her mouth stretching in a deathly grin at Kevin. The mad glee in her eyes was far more frightening than her rage had been.

"That girl!" Kevin gasped. "She is...?"

"The Will of the Abyss," Liam answered in a horrified whisper.

"What?" Kevin cried. "No!"

He tried to scramble to his feet, reaching for her, calling out out to her as the room stretched and broke apart. The floor split and angled upward under them suddenly, throwing him back.

Liam heard another, deeper voice echoing Kevin's cry. He glanced up to see a massive Chain in the form of a suit of armor looming above him, leaning toward Alice. Kevin muttered the knight's name in surprise, but the Chain ignored him and lurched across the churning floor toward her.

"Will of Abyss!" it shouted desperately as more cracks opened in the walls. "No! Wait! I wanted to meet you!"

The floor dissolved, the White Knight disappeared as the walls shattered into fragments, and Alice vanished into endless white. As he and Kevin spun away into the dark again, Liam found himself thinking, "that's not how the story goes; the White Knight was supposed to be there before Vincent..."

He felt Kevin slip away from him, clawing at the darkness, staring in shock at the place where Alice had vanished. Suddenly Liam remembered the battered little boy whom the Vessalius family had found wandering with no memory, and young Vincent Nightray searching for his lost brother for years, and Gilbert waiting a decade to see his master again. He grabbed onto Kevin with all his strength and held on as long as he could, but the Abyss dragged at him like some vast, invisible fiend and he finally lost his grip.

"Xerxes!" he screamed, and sat up suddenly on hard cobblestones.

He glanced around, gasping to catch his breath. A figure wrapped in a tattered black cloak lay on the ground a few feet away. Liam choked with relief, first, then with fear that Kevin might not have survived being dragged into the Abyss and flung back out again, and then, finally, with a creeping sense of dread that he was there at all. He scrambled over to him, carefully turned him onto his back and lifted his head. Kevin groaned softly, but his eyes didn't open.

His _eyes_, Liam thought. His mind raced in circles like the cackling dolls in white Alice's madhouse playroom, and spun back to the moment he'd first seen this man lying on his back on the floor outside the Rainsworth's gate, blood streaming from the gaping hole where his left eye should have been. How could he possibly be _here_? And if he was here, what about Xerxes Break?

Liam heard a footstep on the pavement behind him, and turned and looked over his shoulder. There was Xerxes himself, peering around a corner of the alley at him.

"Aha, Liam!" he said cheerily as he came around the corner. "I knew you were up to something, but I didn't expect to find you here, of all places! If you go out investigating things by yourself, you'll have to write your own report about it later, you know. You can't expect other people to write your reports for you!"

Even as he joked, the look in his eye was serious as he studied the unconscious man sprawled on the ground in front of Liam. Serious but speculating, Liam realized; he had not yet seen who it was.

He couldn't do anything but watch as Break came closer, stepped up beside him, and looked down at the man whose head lay in his lap. The frivolous mask dropped from his face in an instant. He stared down, his single eye wide open, just as horrified as Liam had seen it reflected in the mirror shard.

_But that was Kevin's eye, not Break's_, he thought, bewildered.

Break stayed frozen like that for a long moment, while Liam stared up at him with his heart pounding. Then he stepped closer and knelt beside them. His face was blank, but he reached out and brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen across Kevin's closed eyes, so gently that Liam gaped in wonder at him.

"My goodness, Liam," Break said quietly. "What have you done?"

"Me?" Liam said, his voice coming out in a shocked squeak that echoed off the alley walls. Kevin shifted but still didn't wake up. Liam winced and went on in a harsh whisper. "I didn't! I couldn't have..."

He trailed off, speechless. He stared down at Kevin's pale face, as white as paper between his own dark cloak and Liam's coat, and wondered if Break was right. Had he done something to cause this? Had he somehow pulled Kevin out of the Abyss, out of Break's own past - or out of a memory shard that had fallen from the ruins of Cheshire's world?

Break cocked an eyebrow at him.

"Coming here alone like this," he said, "you've obviously done _something_."

Hastily, Liam tried to explain what had happened. Every word sounded more surreal, even to his own ears. If it wasn't for the man lying here in front of him, he'd think he'd dreamed it all out of the story he'd heard and the workings of his own curious imagination.

Because, he realized as he went on in a hurried whisper, he had been intensely curious about Kevin Regnard, the person Xerxes Break had once been, ever since Duke Barma's revelation. More moved than shocked by his story, he had wanted to know everything he could about that man's life and the circumstances that led to his horrifying arrival outside the Rainsworth's Door to the Abyss. Liam had guessed at some of the unspoken details, but he'd tried not to wonder about things that Break obviously hadn't wanted to reveal or even remember.

So even though he didn't see how it really could be his fault that Kevin was lying here on his lap, he felt oddly guilty about it as he went on. Here was Break's past, lying right out in the open in front of him. He fully expected Break to be furious, or at least, certainly, horrified.

But Break's blank expression had softened by the time he was done with his muddled explanation, and a smile that Liam would almost call wistful had appeared on his face. Most surprising of all, Kevin had relaxed as well; he only looked deeply asleep now. Liam watched, fascinated, as Break lightly stroked his cheek with the back of his knuckle. He never would have expected Break to touch his own past self so gently.

The sight stirred something inside him, as if the fiercely protective love he had for Break had suddenly doubled. He briefly imagined having the same kind of relationship with Kevin that he had now with Break.

He shook his head to clear it of that idea, but a second later, he thought of Break and Kevin being together in the same way.

As if he knew exactly where Liam's thoughts had gone, Break turned to him, his smile broadened into a wide grin. He actually looked genuinely amused.

"You just can't get enough of me, can you, Liam?" he said.

Liam nearly choked. What had he done, indeed?

* * *

_I would say "to be continued," but I have Absolutely No Idea if I will ever get to the threesome that this is supposed to lead to. I mean. When was the last time I managed to follow up on a WIP? *hides*_

_But yeah, I want more of Kevin, too, so I'll try!_


End file.
